Tag: anniversary

This episode’s first half concerns rough drafts of all kinds, starting with the rough draft of Hime’s new Puppy, whose name is still accompanied by (Tentative). Hime wants the puppy’s name to be perfect, but if she waits too long, it won’t know what name to answer to.

Hime’s own name wasn’t chosen by Kakushi—it was unveiled in a calligraphy ceremony to which he was just another spectator. Still, he can’t deny it’s a damn good name, regardless of where it came from. Similarly, Hime picks “Gotou Roku” after misunderstanding the pet registrar.

Kakushi has actually attached (Tentative) to the title of all his manga, only for the (Tentative) to be eventually dropped in the absence of a better name. Once a name is chosen, even a tentative one, it becomes harder to justify changing it as time goes on.

This phenomenon also applies to rough drafts, in which Kakushi can never quite match in ink the full essence of the original pencil-drawn line. This, despite the fact that finished manga requires ink, leading him to attempt to submit the rough drafts—a submission quickly rejected by the brass.

While on a visit to the storage house in Kamakura to return the painting of his wife and her dog, Kakushi stumbles across another painting by his father-in-law: a portrait of him, his wife, and Hime enjoying a meal in that very house. It’s titled “Ordinary Future Plans (Tentative)”, but the title isn’t what’s tentative, the future is.

It’s a beautiful, idealized initial vision Kakushi feels he’s not yet been able to surpass, and may never be able to do so. But simply returning home to Hime to find she’s made a friend, Kayo, who claims Hime “saved her” by reaching out with a hand of friendship, helps puts things in perspective for Kakushi.

The second half of the episode is about anniversaries, be they weird random ones like the 38th anniversary of the comic book in which Kakushi’s manga appears (which can sometimes spell desperation and trouble ahead), to something more round and substantial, like the 100th chapter of his manga. The former has a fancy crest and heavy promotion; the latter goes largely un-celebrated, but for a “flash mob” frame Rasuna snuck in.

When Hime hides something she’s reading from Kakushi when he comes home, he suspects she may have received a love letter, and tells her to politely decline while following her to see what swine would try to ask his Hime out. It turns out to be an invite to a birthday party, which Hime actually wants to go to. She only wavers because she’s worried about all the extra work Pops would have to do for her birthday party.

Doing his best to realign her priorities from “not troubling daddy” to “celebrating milestones while she still can”, Kakushi assures her that not only will he be honored to work his butt off throwing an awesome party to which she can invite anyone and everyone she wants, but they’ll also have a party that’s just the two of them (plus Roku).

That last bit is important, because as soon as Hime sees Kakushi with the pretty cooking tutor in the kitchen, she becomes weary of losing her very important and exclusive father-daughter bond. That bond may not have been planned, nor did Kakushi plan on “being saved” by Hime like her new friend Kayo. But before he knew it, the (Tentative) became the final.

As Hime learns upon discovering a house in Kamakura just like the one she grew up in Nakameguro, which has a stained glass window depicting a happy family of three, a great deal was planned out prior to her awareness, from methods of upbringing to clothing and celebration guides. But it dawns on her that this house, which was initially meant to be her home, was abandoned in favor of the other house.

An older Tomaruin and Rasuna muse over the practicalities of Kakushi moving to an identical house closer to the city, in part so his assistants wouldn’t have to travel so far to work on manga with him. But despite not growing up in that first draft house in Kamakura, it’s clear Hime still had a happy childhood in its second draft in Nakameguro.

The final episode of Aho Girl falls on the tenth anniversary of A-kun and Yoshiko meeting when she and her mom moved in next door. Yoshiko sought a playmate, and it was derision at first sight for A-kun, a stoic, studious five-year-old. She treats every attempt to avoid or get away from her as a game, and never wants to stop playing. When she gives him a big long kiss, he uppercuts her into the sky for the first time.

Realizing the key to keeping Yoshiko away is physical superiority, A-kun begins rigorous training, Rocky-style. Alas, he ends up training too hard and passes out. He wakes up with Yoshiko on top of him, she stayed by his side for an entire day while he was out with a cold. He almost allows that she’s “not that bad” until his mom tells him she was kissing him the whole time. To add insult to injury, his punches can’t even faze her!

If fighting her doesn’t work, A-kun considers other options; after all, he can’t let this go on, lest he end up marrying Yoshiko and having idiot kids with her. So he turns into a demented pervert and chases her around, flipping her skirt, until she cries and he feels guilty for going to far. But even here Yoshiko manages to get the wrong idea, and apologizes for making A-kun “hold back”, removing her panties and putting them on his face.

Ten years later, she’s wearing those same panties (which don’t fit her anymore at all), still trying to play with A-kun when all he wasnts is peace and quiet; and after all these years he still wants to kill her. But if he’s honest, isn’t he glad there’s someone in his life to make things interesting? No. He hates her guts. But does he? Yes.

Gosh, has it only been three years since Aquarion Evol? I’m getting too old for this shit. Now it’s apparently the tenth anniversary of the Aquarion franchise, the first installment of which I never watched. Evol felt kinda like Macross Frontier’s younger, less accomplished, more sex-obsessed red-headed cousin, complete with mecha battles set to pop ballads.

I assumed Logos wouldn’t have anything to do with Evol or the first Aquarion, but this first half of the first episode would seem to be a kind of commemorative prologue/forward/episode 0 before getting into Logos in earnest. It also seems like an attempt to squeeze a feature-length movie into 26 minutes. It is packed, and it rarely makes sense.

But Aquarion has never been about making a whole lot of sense, it’s about shoving as much stuff onto the screen as possible as youths do battle in elaborate CGI mecha with super-elaborate attacks with goofy names fueled by love and/or lust. Casts from both previous shows appear as though from different dimensions, along with a couple new characters residing in a third in 1966 Japan, Yuno and Shin, who look just like Yunoha and her dearly departed friend Jin from Evol.

The reason for the dimensional merging/out-of-whackness revolves around an old book in a language only Yuno could read, until Shin came along and read it. They accidentally tear the book in two, and we’re off to the chaotic races, with the two of them being whisked from one bizarre, trippy inter-dimensional setting to another, all while some old fart lectures about tadpole awareness as they grow into frogs in his hand. Are you getting all this?

Anywho Yunoha’s stuffed frog travels to a dimenison and forms a froglike Aquarion with Yuno and Shin, who combined with the other Aqarion crews, manage to zip up the dimensions and get everyone home (or kaeru, which also apparently means frog.) Yunoha wakes up to see her hand being held by an apparition of Jin. I kinda wanted everything that had happened before to be her dream, but nope, all that stuff happened.

But now what? This first half reached dizzying heights of nonsense masquerading as profoundness, but l was frankly pretty disoriented throughout, having been just thrown back into a franchise I hadn’t watched in over three years, and which I thought would be moving on from what I had watched. The preview for the second half suggests it will do just that…so maybe this was just one last curtain call for the last two shows? I guess I’ll find out.

This week, it’s not just New Year’s Eve, but also the anniversary of Ryou and Kirin meeting. That calls for more than just New Year’s Soba. Shiina, who will be off with her family (apparently a dangerous affair) suggests Oden, and Ryou agrees: Oden it is.

Kirin doesn’t reserve a seat and has to wait for an late train because she was watching TV, while Ryou polishes her home to a blinding sheen, starts cooking, and a single innocent taste ends up being closer to a dozen tastes, to the point we thought Ryou might accidentally eat all the oden before Kirin arrived.

To me, this sequence kind of felt like early Thanksgiving day, when everyone is either in transit or preparing the feast. To avoid further temptation, Ryou leaves the house to wait for Kirin at the station, as she did the first time they met.

She recalls how lonely it once felt to watch loved ones reunite at the station. Now, she has someone to wait for, and after waiting out in the cold so long with a skirt and no gloves or hat, Kirin, who is still warm from the train, is a welcome presence. You can really feel the love as they hug again on the way to Ryou’s house.

After positively stuffing themselves on soba, boiled eggs, daikon, konjac, fishcakes, and mochi-stuffed fried tofu (!), they, along with Ryou’s aunt, strike back out into the cold night for their first shrine visit of the year, and cut through that cold with piping cups of amazake, which I’ve never tried before but now MUST, as the way its described and the manner in which it’s enjoyed make it all but irresistible.

There’s also the fact that after a year, Kirin has gotten better at acting like her lovely charming self around adults. It’s a subtle but welcome development, as one day Kirin will be an adult herself, so she’d better get used to interacting with them, beyond her own parents.

Akira ditches Kirin and her niece to drink with some dudes, so Ryou and Kirin head back home and have some oden leftovers. As Ryou watches a content Kirin resting her head on the table, she tells Kirin how it was her who taught her that food tastes better when sharing it with those you love.

Ryou also wishes, in her head, that even many New Years from now, the two of them will remain friends who share their cooking with one another. Kirin then echoes Ryou’s thoughts out loud, suggesting they will indeed be good friends many years down the road.

Chaika has been so swept up in the quest for her father’s remains (and in getting hoodwinked and/or kidnapped), that in spite of how long she’s been with the Acura siblings, she still knows very little about them, besides the fact they’re fierce fighters and loyal friends. That’s rectified this week, in a quiet, reflective episode focused on memories, and how they make us who we are and set us on our paths.

Chaika first brings memories up as a potential source of magic fuel when all the shops are out as a result of the End of War Anniversary festivities. Having watched Valvrave with Hannah, I knew all too well what could become of using one’s memories as a fuel that is merely consumed but not replenished, and Tooru is quick to dismiss the idea as a last resort, suspecting that in more desperate times (or against her will) Chaika had done so in the past, leading to her present memory gap.

When they come across a wagon train of peddlers, Tooru remembers the ones who used to visit the village of Acura where he and Akari grew up and trained to become saboteurs under the tutelage of their mentor, Shin. Of those times Tooru has both happy and painful memories. Happy because he and Akari had so much fun together, but sad because one group of peddlers—including a woman named Hasumin whose praise he desperately desired but never got—were attacked by bandits.

He watched her die, and all of Shin’s talk about him not being cut out for the cutthroat world of sabotage rang in his ear when he couldn’t protect her. It’s a painful memory; one Tooru often clings to, and wishes he could turn into magic fuel. Elsewhere, an impoverished ex-soldier steals from a rich woman, while the keeper of the last shop on their list happens to be the one with fuel in stock, because he doesn’t feel like celebrating the end of the war, which claimed his wife and children.

Not to quote Captain Kirk, but he was right that we shouldn’t want our pain taken away; we need our pain; both good and bad memories define who we are. Hasumin didn’t really die in vain, because the Tooru that pain shaped would go on to meet Chaika in that forest and save her, from not only that evil unicorn, but most likely from using up the rest of her memories as fuel. Now that Chaika has friends and memories to cherish, she won’t be as cavalier with them.

Stray Observations:

“‘Fireworks?’ What are ‘fireworks?’ We only got ‘pyrospheres’ in these parts!”

I loved Chaika’s wordless exchange of faces with the shopkeeper’s spawn. GET TO BED, WASTREL.

It was definitely fun to see Lil’ Tooru and Lil’-er Akari dashing around in the past. Akari was just as devoted to him back then. It’s funny to see how little she’s changed, even if she tries to hide it in deadpan.

I actually didn’t mind Alberic and Vivi’s scene at the market, which boiled down to the notion that “justice doesn’t fill stomachs”. Their cookie fortunes were a bit on-the-nose, however.

I was less interested in the other Gillette guys shootin’ the breeze. I feel like it would have been better if the entire GIllette Corps was just Alberic and Vivi. The rest still feel extraneous to this time-strapped show (even if a second season is in the pipeline).

Looks like there’s a sky fortress in our future…those are the best kind!